Climate protestors win historic High Court victory against unlawful police stop and search operation in Kingsnorth, Kent - the largest and most expensive such operation in UK history involving 26 police forces

The harassment and exclusion of legal observers, the violent arrest of women refusing to be searched, the aggressive interrogation of local residents, the threatening of journalists with arrest for doing their job, the confiscation of 100s of items such as childrens' costumes and crayons, attempted dawn raids on the camp, the use of batons and CS gas against peaceful protesters, and the forced search of 1000s of people and the adding of their personal data to a secret database. This type of political policing has to stop, and the right to legitimate protest re-established.

Climate Camp August 2009 - Hamish Campbell

Climate campers get a lesson in citizen journalismCampaigners learn speed is paramount in creating their own reports of news events

From Paul Lewis guardian.co.uk, Thursday 27 August 2009 20.40 BST

Mobile phones, laptops, digital cameras and camcorders were laid out on bails of hay  a display of weaponry at the heart of the UK's increasingly technological protest movement.Huddled beside the equipment on a a patch of grass today, legs crossed and notebooks open, were the environmental activists who had arrived for a lesson in "citizen journalism". This was the first and, some said, most important workshop in a week-long programme at the Climate Camp demonstration, a sustainable campsite constructed in Blackheath, south-east London.The lesson in how to "shoot, edit and distribute" a 60-second report using a mobile phone in less than 10 minutes is considered as important as learning how to invade airport runways or throw sludge at politicians.But the course teachers, Hamish Campbell and Richard Hering, who have been making political activist films since the mid-1990s, were circumspect about what amateurs can achieve.For a bystander with a mobile and a nose for a story, practicalities and speed are paramount."If police are doing something really stupid and you think they're going to smash your camera, quickly upload the clip remotely on to the internet," said Campbell. "They can confiscate or break your mobile but the film is out there."Their curriculum included instructions on making audio-slideshows using other people's pictures and, for the more ambitious, a simple explanation of how to turn 15 minutes of raw footage into a three-minute news report. "What will make the difference between you and old media, or dying media," said Hering, "is that they have lighting for indoor shots. So do your interviews outside."The importance of amateur reporting became apparent at the G20 protests in April, when dozens of cases of alleged police brutality were captured on mobile phones and cameras by protesters and bystanders in the crowd.Citizen journalists came to prominence again in Iran in June, when protesters took to the streets to complain about alleged fraud in the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,.For Campbell and Hering, who post footage via their own site, visionOntv, amateur journalism will become more effective once reportage is refined.With activists unhappy with sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, which they complain are censorious "corporates", much citizen-generated content at protests is posted on Indymedia, an online forum. A founder of the site, who asked not to be named, said: "The mainstream media has realised the value of reports from people who are participating in an event. It's the power of crowd-sourced information

Co op travelling Exhibition

"All for each and each for all."

A travelling exhibition

In 1994 to Celebrate the opening of the shop in Toad Lane Rochdale the Cooperative Movement Commissioned an Exhibition, to open in Rochdale. The exhibition was to be a commercial presentation with a budget of a million pounds, and a more homely exhibition of Cooperative Artefacts from each decade, to be opened by the Queen.With the Cooperative College we collected as many banners from the constituent groups of the movement. This enabled us to gather collect document record photograph and make recommendations as to their further conservation.Banners and artefacts were rescued, when found in cellars attics premises about to be demolished and in the care of elderly people whose families threw them away when they died. We found some in skips. Many were wrapped in newspapers many years old, and had survived because they had not been exposed to the light. At the Cooperative Womens' Guild Conference in Scarborough we asked the delegates to bring any banners we unwrapped them and gave advice on insurance and care and conservation. We also hung them around the balconies in the spa, an old custom revived.We travelled the exhibition around England, Scotland and Wales in 1994-5 in our big old camper van. It filled City Halls, City Art Galleries and Museums and Cathedrals. We were self contained and did everything in cooperation with local Cooperative Societies. We appeared on TV, Radio and in local Newspapers. We held a day of events at each venue with International , national and local speakers, A large celebratory cake, poetry, and songs, a banner work shop on another day.As part of the exhibition we helped to communicate the agricultural symbols on the banners by exhibiting two wheatsheafs and a bee skep. We also had two figures, a woman and child dressed in 1930s clothes holding a banner and a shopping basket with period groceries with a coop magazine and a bunch of flowers.Thalia Campbell